


So Bright it Burns

by tawg



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Earth, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-20
Updated: 2009-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-03 10:40:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lister remembers a breif moment from his youth, and tries to deny the effect it had on him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So Bright it Burns

**Author's Note:**

> Set somewhere during the first five seasons, when Rimmer is soft-light.

Maybe it was because Cat didn't really understand socialisation.

Maybe it was because there was a… a solidarity between them now.

Maybe it was just because he was really smegging lonely.

When Lister was a kid, there'd been this twerp who'd lived down the road from his grandma - doin' botany or park studies or dendrophilia or whatever it was at the local college. His grandma's neighbour had told him to stay away from the twerp, but she'd also told him not to play in the jets of water from busted fire hydrants, or set things on fire, so it stood to reason he'd gone out of his way to do the opposite.

Turns out, the twerp - Gavin, maybe? Something stupid - was into plants in a big way. Was also into mind-altering substances derived from plants, and all kinds of crazy shit. But… it was like the way Rimmer was into telegraph poles, you knew the were associated with stuff that was cool - like electricity, Lister was almost as big a fan of electricity as he was of altered states of mind - but the respect they'd held for it all… several shades of unhealthy.

Rimmer was so damned neurotic that sometimes Lister thought the man couldn't possibly be real, but the implications of that were enough to…

But Greg - or George, maybe - had shown him this neat trick, where you get a photo negative and you pin it to a leaf, and you shine light through it. Because plants need light, yeh? They used light to make food, and everything alive needs food, even Rimmer who is something living made of things that quite painfully aren't. Then you soaked it in some stuff that killed all the green out of the plants ('did it hurt?' Lister, aged ten at the time, had asked. 'Probably,' replied Gary). Then you soaked the now-painful-white leaves in this other stuff, and it turned the sugar or whatever it was black.

So you had a picture printed on a plant leaf.

Lister recalled that, a few days after that little lesson, Gabe's little granny flat had been burnt to the ground. The neighbourhood kids had stood on the sidewalk, playing in the jets of water from the hydrant. The neighbourhood teens had stood there, inhaling the smoke and watching the smegger burn. Lister, being somewhat between the two at the time, had thought it strange - ironic, a word he'd learn later when trying to peg down the exact tone of Rimmer's… - perverse that the same things that needed light to live would be bumped off so efficiently by it.

And then, a decade, and three years, and three millennia, and several months that all blended together, Lister would sometimes stand too close to Rimmer - trying to peer at a screen through his stupid smegging head, having to lean over/through/past him to reach a console, being too drunk to notice, despite the angry looks - and Lister's body would brush through Rimmer's not-body, and little sparks and tingles would erupt, like the tiny lights of ash flying up from the fire.

The picture Garret - Gareth? - had printed on the leaf was one of a forest. He had coughed a laugh, because the forest had been cleared to make room for people, and the leaf it was on had been killed to amuse people, and in the end it had all gone up in smoke.

And, despite the little sound that was just like an impatient huff of breath without the actual air movement, despite the angry/wounded/snarling looks Rimmer sent him, Lister didn't think to apologise. With the hologram's projection overlapping his own skin… it wasn't warm, which he'd expected, and it wasn't exactly a comfort. But it was there, reminded Lister that he was alive, even if he was the only one.

He never asked Rimmer what it was like being a hologram.


End file.
